


Untethered

by iimpavid, It_MightBe_Love



Series: original works, collected [3]
Category: Original Work, The Illyrian Codices, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Culture Shock, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Healing, Hope, Hurt/Comfort, Kidfic, Kinship and Kennings, Languages and Linguistics, Magic, Nonbinary Character, Reincarnation, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:40:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28275480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iimpavid/pseuds/iimpavid, https://archiveofourown.org/users/It_MightBe_Love/pseuds/It_MightBe_Love
Summary: After a lifetime of use as the host for the Mother Goddess’s war aspect, the queen of Ichlowand goes to her rest… and finds many things she did not expect. Chief among these surprises are the children of Arda.
Relationships: Erestor/Glorfindel (Tolkien), Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Series: original works, collected [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1037567
Kudos: 4





	1. On Dying

**Author's Note:**

> In which the authors play fast and loose with Tolkien's languages and canon out of the pure, wholesome desire to see their favorite protagonist, The Wolf Queen, given a bit of respite. It's entirely possible that we have our geography and timelines entirely wrong. If that's the case, then do us the kind favor of suspending your disbelief.
> 
> All credit for elf children being slightly terrifying cartilage creatures, and our ideas about elf designs in general, goes directly to Erran a.k.a. LesbianBoromir over on Pillowfort!! [Please go shower them with praise for their innovation and really cool artwork!](https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/1128990)

First comes the world, as dark as the abyss, as the void. Not the Void she knows, with its hungry white Nothing which would consume even the Shadow, but the void of the Mother’s womb. Its water swirls in shades both familiar and not and it weighs heavy in her chest, in her lungs, around her still-beating heart.

Within her breast the kernel of the child she once was cracks and germinates, blossoms and unfurls. She is curious and grief-stricken in the deep waters that swarm the Citadel that should have been her grave. In the dark, her eyes are beacons of light and her voice trembles in her throat… but she does not speak.

_ You have come Far, li'mar and done so well... _

_ It is a lie _ , the dead queen thinks. She has doomed her people to homeless wandering. She has cloven the Continent and left destruction in the wake of her rage. She sees it with a clarity she had not, in life, borne. She resents it.

Where was this wisdom when she walked the dry land above? 

She can feel it when her heart stops beating but she does not know how or when it happens. Time drifts past her like wisps of smoke in the distant air and the water itself loses substance.

When next the Voice speaks, the water shakes its admonishment around her:  _ It is not done to question your Mother. _

Were she still aware of her face, or hands, lips, teeth, tongue, she would frown. If she were aware of her claws, her limbs… 

_ Still you wish to fight. Ta shihar nu til ka sul.  _ Surprise threads Her words like a prayer and maybe a little regret, too. Her daughter is so desperate to persist and yet, _ There is much of my war-aspect in you still li'mar. _

Her daughter gasps for air, her mouth drawn open on a guttural cry. Around her the world resolves into an echoing wound.

_ You are woven so tightly to the world. _ The voice echoes within and without her.  _ Anasiyra _ . 

The name comes unbidden and sight returns to her, a golden gleaming glow, and she weeps for the beauty of it. A hundred thousand griefs trip from her tongue out onto the fathomless floor beneath her. She longs for the world: the touch of water, the smell of wind, the taste of her own mouth and teeth. She has none of it. She rests on the cusp of becoming Nothing at all.

_ … Would that I could return you to the world you know. _

The Mother’s sorrow, as old as Death himself, is no less beautiful than sight but it steels something in her. She says, "No." Where her voice comes, she could never say, only that it is hers and hers alone, a blossom beneath the cleft of her tongue. She has never heard herself speak alone, without the chorus of her foremothers, without the power of her Mother. Still, she persists with the unbearable smallness to argue, "We cannot return. To do so would be the world's unmaking."

A tremulous silence greets her and she drifts in the silence beyond time and thought with only unbeing before her. 

_ Then we shall untether you, _ the Mother concludes.

“It is the only choice”, she agrees, though she doesn’t know what it means and for the first time in her life she is unsure of herself, “to return my soul to the world that is and was would be to undo all that my line has accomplished _.” It would allow Him to persist.  _ She could not bear the suffering of her people again, to make again the mistakes she had doomed her line to-- each of which led Ichlowand to its doom as surely as the strand led to the Sea. 

_ I will unspool the thread of your Voice from the world. _

The queen of the sea feels as though the world has been set alight with a terrible fire. Her skin aches with the burning of her Mother's fingers, bones ripping and skin tearing, a Voiceless scream for mercy erupting from her throat. There can be no mercy in necessary change and so she receives none.

_ E’es’tra d’amoor’ka lesdzra _ , her Mother instructs one last time over the cacophony of pain. 

_ Chase the light, for in it the world is made _ . 

Then all is silent.

* * *

She awakes to murmuring, she aches and deep within her, a deep wound flutters: she is halved. Around her there is only a glimmering gray sound. The light it casts is not painful but she winces from it anyway. She is halved. He is gone from her-- and so, too, are her people.

"Strange child..." Cool fingers caress her cheek and she startles, her hand snapping up to grasp the spindly appendage touching her so familiarly. The hand is smooth but strong. The creature looking down at her-- he is not of illyrian blood, though his shape resembles those land-growing people, and he is not mortal. She is certain of that last by the distant hum of power in his voice. "You do not belong here…" 

A whisper of knowing creeps through her,  _ A final gift to the Daughter of Idryalla: the language of this world.  _ With that gift, she asks, "Where are we?"

Even to her own ears, her voice sounds strange, with too many echoing tones for the cavernous hall she has woken in yet bereft of Power. Her armor is heavy and for the first time in her life she wishes she could take it off. Her eyes open and cannot quite focus on the being before her because she has only two eyes with which to see here and the air feels so thin. 

He is tall, the stranger who bends over her, taller even than her own people, and straight in his bearing.

“You are in the Halls of Mandos,” he tells her. His voice is not cruel but it is heavy enough to sink into her very bones. “I am often called Námo by the souls who await judgement here. You are no child of my Father’s.” His brow is furrowed with the weight of curiosity-- this creature, she realizes, is not accustomed to Not Knowing.

"We are--" she starts and reaches for the pool of thought and memory of her race because her foremothers will know this place, surely, they will advise her how best to speak, to know. She finds it in the center of her knowing… but it is veiled and the veil is impossible to move. A slab of lead would be easier to shift. It is, she understands, as if... "We are untethered," she announces.

Her Mother's words ring once more in her ears: she is  _ Untethered but not Unmade _ . Mother has cut her off from her people, from her beloved and cursed brother, and sent her…  _ here _ . She is beyond the world she knows.

"You are wounded." Námo says, with a tone that is both observing and correcting at once. “You may find respite here as many of Eru’s children do...” He pauses, glancing to the side as if he were conversing with some unseen party. The faint furrow of displeased confusion does not leave his face. “There is much grief in you and, though you are not of this creation, you shall not be consigned to the Void. You are too alone.”

The last note rings more foreign to her than anything else she’s heard yet: it is pity. By the look of it, pity is foreign to this creature called Námo, too. It is stranger to him than unknowing, than even her own self is a stranger to this place, and he mislikes the weight of the feeling.

_ Alone _ . The final weight of the word… he has  _ judged  _ her alone, she thinks.  _ That  _ is what he is, he is a judge and he speaks the truth of this Creation. She should be judged by Karesh-- familiar Karesh who served Death with love and contrition and knew always how to comfort the souls in his care, Karesh who was a creature of compassion, not pity. This Judge should not be her judge and yet he is and he has, with neither pity nor compassion, told her the truth: she is utterly alone. 

The mighty queen of Ichlowand, she who became War to save her people by destroying them, heaves a sob. 

She does not fight against the boundless, shimmering grey which enfolds her. 

* * *

She dwells long in the Halls. She is there for less than the blink of an eye. 

Grief settles into the seat of her spine and she learns how to move despite it, to stretch her aching body around it and to stand with its weight shifting her center of gravity. It doesn’t leave her.

“It won’t, Úennen,” Nienna tells her. Nienna is another strange creature, built like Námo, unreasonably vast and smelling always of tears though her eyes are seldom clouded by them. “Grief is more alive than the living.” 

She accepts this because she can do nothing else.

It is a strange name that these vast creatures have crafted for her,  _ Úennen _ , but it is not cruelly intended and it sits on their teeth like glittering potential whenever they say it. She is  _ Unnamed _ ; they do not know her, these Shapers of the World (as she came to think of them), and so she might become anything. 

It means little to her, this potential, this  _ hope  _ they instill into the chord of her kenning. It is not the name her Mother gave her. It is only another foreign sound amid an alien symphony, here in this place beyond what she knows.

"The world outside my hall is called Arda." 

They are always telling her things as if she were a child, these two Shapers, Námo and Nienna, as if she ever asked questions aloud-- which she did not. Or she thinks she does not speak but… She may have, she concedes, Spoken without knowing it. Her Voice was still many but it resonated with very little in the fibers of this place and her body was less substantial than thought. She could scarcely hear herself. She, who had once brought all of Illyria to heel beneath her blade.

No, that was not right. _That_ was her brother, inseparable as they were from one another. Her brother was the Conqueror, the Devourer, the Beautiful. His names, many and magnificent, are mere percussion when she speaks them now, barely audible over the music of a foreign god’s Creation. Her brother sought to hold the planet in his palm and thought to crush it when he finally did and she had only done what was necessary to oppose him, taking every inch of it back one conquest at a time. She had done no more than her Mother had bade she must.

Úennen is no stranger to curiosity, though it takes her long to remember how it felt to long for something other than blood. She brings herself to ask, after much waxing and waning of song, “Why were we sent here?”

Námo was silent for so long she thought the question had offended him but eventually he turned his eyes to her and she saw all the ages of this creation reflected in their star-scattered mass. “I don’t know.” The furrow returned to his brow.

Nienna, the gentler of the Shapers she had met so far (she suspected there were many more, much like her Mother’s Templars, the Creator here was too large to seek only one form), came to offer a more useful perspective, “It was kinder to send you away than to unmake you.” 

Nienna and Námo both witnessed Úennen’s grief-- its origins which spawned deeper than the Child War-- and her rage -- which reached farther shores than even the sea herself could touch-- and all she had done to quell both on behalf of every one of her subjects, living and dead. What she had done and undone for those lost voices had spurred her forward her whole life long. They knew her as well as she could hope to know herself. The gaps in her memory were great, though: there was endless war; the burning depths that came after the Isles; the knowledge that some great love, greater than anything between living creatures, greater even than the stars, was lost to her forever. 

When she reaches toward these empty spaces the despair and fury pull back and threaten a tidal wave.

This is, somehow, kinder than being unmade. She agrees with Nienna’s conclusion but she hates it.

She does not reach for the silences in her own mind. She pursues the crushed and burnt kernel of a child’s curiosity instead.

"What is Arda?"

The great judge, whom she has learned is kinder than he likes to seem, struggles to find an answer to her question. “It is the world. In it dwell Elves and Men and many smaller creatures. It is new enough that it is not yet old but it is old enough that it is no longer new.”

_ He speaks like a jezda _ , she thinks, _ always in riddles _ . She was never one to untangle them well. Her purpose was war… but the war was ended, her brother was cast out of Being, and without war she had no purpose. 

She misses her teachers sorely. She even misses their riddles. 

The purposelessness of being without War festers in her but it does not poison that seed striving to take root in the muddy water of her soul. She was never a child but once upon a time, long before she understood that Mother was both loving  _ and _ terrible, she was curious.

“How did Arda come to be?” 

“Who are your siblings?” 

“What are you all?” 

“Why are your Voices so small?”

“What does this world call itself?” 

“How do these first people persist with such short knowing, without being  _ we _ ?”

“Why were  _ they  _ made to sound so small?” 

Every answer she gets is met with more questions until there is a rest between movements of the great song and she announces with the confidence of the queen she once was, “We will see it. We  _ must  _ see it.” 

There were ships, she had glimpsed them in some soul-window or other in her wandering of the endless Halls. The other creatures here were faint and dim and caught in their own griefs and knowings but they saw into each other once in a while. These people were people of water. Water was her people’s birthright, too, and she had no choice but to seek it out. It was her nature. She tells him so.

Námo has nearly grown irritated by her questioning but this turn gives him pause. “There is much grief in you still.” He does not think she has mastered it… but he does not Know or he would have denied her outright.

She presses his unsureness, leans into her own alien nature: "As there will always be; we were made for it. It is our duty to bear it and to find a way to bear it with grace." She may have been a queen but she was never graceful.

“Let her go,” Nienna does not quite plead. “She cannot master her grief any further here. 

He deliberates long but not long enough that the stranger forgets her request. She sits at the foot of his throne with the patience of a general. She was once a general, too-- one who might even give his own brothers, wicked and divine, pause. But she has no bloodlust in her now. 

He agrees with his over-kind sister for the second time in existence: he sends Úennen on her way and hopes she finds what it is she seeks without dooming the world a second time.


	2. On Re-embodiment

The world as the no-longer-dead queen finds it, far from the Halls of Mandos, is filled with color. Such color as to make her eyes water for it is entirely wrong to what she expects.

She wanders aimlessly through the trees, which are brown and green-- rather than black and red, a fact she could marvel at until the end of her days-- but are beautiful nonetheless. She spends at least one full day in awe of the sky-shades that fill the boughs of a tree whose name she does not know, petting her hands over low-hanging leaves that have no sharp edges at all and humming in response to the deep, slow song the tree’s breathing makes. Some of its trunk is scarred and the scars are the same color as the filth under her nails. 

She’s dirty, she knows. She woke in the forest in her armor and her armor was no cleaner than it had been when she died. Viscera stained the gleaming black metal and there was dying red kelp stuck into the seams of her vambraces. Her greaves were caked with mud or blood that had dried to a yellow-brown and stank. The foreign air that stirs the trees smells so sweet it almost smells of nothing at all and that makes her keenly aware of herself. Either she will draw predators with her stench or frighten them away; she does not know which is most likely. She does not know what manner of animal she will find here.

She couldn’t remember taking notice of herself like this ever before. It certainly hadn’t occurred to her when she chose to sink the Isles that she might smell foul. Her body is a tool, well-made for battle and little else, though it houses her soul, or what is left of it. 

She remembers little between dying and now but she remembers this: she is Unwoven from the Song of Illyria and her own People. Grief glances off her wakeful mind and slips back into the shadows of her consciousness.

Rather instead she happens upon a waterfall and focuses all of her intent into tracking it. The water is clear except for the places where it reflects the sky: it is so blue as to recall the acid marshes and she can scarcely breathe. It is unworldly, the blue she glimpses in the breaks of the canopy. It is unnatural. But it is not unwholesome, she’s sure of it. She follows the course of the babbling waterfall and its stream until the forest gives way to plains. There is a river running at an angle to her merry little stream, wide and shallow enough to be slow.

Her armor sinks into the sand and silt beside the river heavily before she wades naked into the waters.

* * *

The watch over the River Lhûn, just West of Lindon’s bustling fortress-port of Mithlond, is a quiet post more often than it isn’t but Glorfindel wakes with the smell of burning hair clung to the inside of his nose and lungs nonetheless. 

His eyes open in the thin light of predawn and he doesn’t blink away the weight of sleep. He doesn’t need to; he’s already wide awake, with his heart leaping in his chest and every muscle tense. 

He stares up at the heavy wood beams of his quarters’ ceiling while breathing as slowly as he can through his nose. He smells the sweetgrass stuffed into his pillow and mattress-- old but still strong enough to ward off vermin. He smells the clean metal of his sword where it leans at his bedside-- in easy reach should he find he needs it. He can even smell the salt of the sea coming in on the East wind from the Bay of Lhûn. There will be a storm in the early afternoon, he thinks, by the weight of the soft breeze coming in around the shutters. They’re unlatched, just the way he left them the night before lest the early summer make his modest room too hot.

Glorfindel can smell no fire here.

He rises from the dream as if it had never come to him at all and makes his way about the necessities of morning. 

* * *

The gold of mid-morning brings a scout with news: “A soldier, sir, in the foothills of Ered Luin!” Aias was young, still, human on her father’s side, and excitable. She’d clearly ridden hard at the end of her watch; her pale cheeks were wind-stung pink and her dark eyes gleamed.

She’s disappointed by the lack of intensity she’s met with. Glorfindel only frowns, “Just one?” 

“Yes-- not an elf and in black armor. No horse or company that I could see, but headed West from the Tower Hills.” 

“How far from the river?” 

“Not even a league.”

He nods, “Well, then, we must not let him go without our fine company any longer. Send a bird to Mithlond; then we’ll ride to meet him.” 

“Right away, sir!” 

Gil-galad will not appreciate, he thinks, the news of strangers crossing Lindon’s border in these already-strange days, on the heels of Numenor’s civil war… but that will be a problem to be solved later. First, there was the matter of this wandering soldier.

* * *

Glorfindel took no large company with him to the riverside, only the scout and himself, mounted and armed though he had no ill feeling about the stranger they rode to meet.

Asfaloth’s halter was hung with bells, small glittering craftwork that chimed softly with each step, warning of his approach from a southern ascent... and distracting from Aias in the copse and thicket just north of the river’s bend where the foreign soldier has seen fit to stop a while to bathe. If this odd day turned from odd to ill, he liked his chances against some servant of the Enemy more than he liked Aias’s. 

The soldier’s armor lay in disassembled piecemeal on the pebbled bank and no arms lay with it. It was simply made but with an eye for beauty in form, her armor, it welcomed the light, black metal limning to gold. No elvish smith made it but, to his eye, nor did any servant of Morgoth have a hand in its shaping.

When he’s close enough for the wind to carry his voice, he calls out to her: “ _ Ai _ ! Greetings, lady! Pardon the intrusion, but I can't help but wonder what your business bathing in the Lhûn is!” Glorfindel speaks the Westron tongue as easily as any crafted by elves; it’s a fair bet to use with a stranger. “It’s all snowmelt this time of year-- surely you’d prefer a bath?” 

The word for  _ cold _ was known to her, but only because she had known a little of the Mroz whose Veillands had many words indeed for what her counselor, Mikhail,  _ claimed  _ was a broad spectrum of  _ types  _ of cold. Her home in Ichlowand had no such  _ unwarm _ . The water of the steady river in which she sought to clean herself is indeed  _ cold _ , enough that the walls of Blackmoor’s fortress in winter spring to mind. She might find herself confused as to where she was if she did not have the omnipresent reminder of the sky-green trees and the rolling plains with their grasses that turned cloud-yellow in the light of the sun.

The single sun.

It does much to explain the cold, the lone star lighting the sky. She wonders, too, how many moons she will find when night comes. It took three to steer the seas of Illyria but she has not seen the sea here, yet. Maybe it is a tamer creature altogether here in this Arda. Wouldn’t that be a sight? 

Every ripple of the brisk water startles her but the rush of it washed away the green of old blood, viscera and flesh from her time in the Depths of the Mother’s Womb. That she was not born away from her world and also cleaned is a question for another time; she is still too awestruck to contemplate such base mechanics. 

Perhaps, she wonders, it is meant to reflect her soul: maybe it is as torn and damaged as she herself still feels. Beneath the curiosity she delights at the fishes that curl around her hips and come to the muddy shallows to investigate her webbed toes. Though she is hungry, she decides she must not eat them. She does not know what life and power exists in the living things of Arda yet and so it is best to abstain. For caution’s sake. She has learned much from her brother’s immoderation.

In this world's dappled sunlight the scales along her pelvis gleam and cast strange reflections back out across the water that draw more aquatic creatures to her. She gasps at one such shelled being, no bigger than her palm, and cradles it gently to inspect it. It is no mighty zhepad, no drake with a shell that could be crafted into the mighty rain drums of the deserts of Illyria, it is only a small reptile with unsure eyes, and after a few more minutes of prodding she releases it to the reeds it had swum from to investigate her.

She pulls bone pins from her hair one at a time, fingers tugging knots free from the multitude of white braids twining her crown.

Above the babbling of the water she hears bells and turns at the waist in time to spy--

She would think him Ichlowandian for the shape of him, tall and golden and long in the ear, save that he has too few limbs and dull teeth and his gloves tell her his fingers have no webbing. He is bright in the light, astride a great beast which resembles the mounts of the men of the illyrian outlands. The beast also has too-dull teeth. His language is familiar, though without any context, and how she knows the words to reply is beyond her.

How she knows the words at all is a strange thing.

"We do not know the Lhûn, nor what a bath is. We thought only to wash off the filth of battle and our own death from us." Her voices carry in multitudes across the water.

“The Lhûn is the river,” he supplies helpfully, sounding cheerful, “and a bath would be much warmer than she is in spring-- and it would be indoors.” 

Glorfindel brings Asfaloth to a halt close to but not between the warrior and her armor. 

The metal plate is distractingly beautiful. The strappings and underlayers are of a greenish leather and all of it is crusted with the brown of dry blood. The smell of it is too sharp for the hot-iron stench so familiar to Glorfindel’s nose and it gives him pause. Without taking his eyes off the woman in the river, he gestures to Aias with his right hand, hidden as it is by Asfaloth’s neck:  _ be ready _ . 

“You say,  _ ‘we’ _ , lady-- do I need to keep an eye out for your companions? We could do much to help you all if I knew how many you were and how badly wounded.”

_ A river called Lhûn _ . She had heard stranger things. 

She turns in the water, one bone hair pin tucked between the fingers of her right hand, just in case. Thumb, index and middle finger all that remain there. She has not yet regrown them since the traitor Tyernen bit them off in that last skirmish-- for all it had felt clandestine at the time it had been but one skirmish of many more to come in her bloodline-- there never seemed an appropriate time to do so.

She is not sure she could do it now, either. Huragan had never seen fit to teach her all the ways her Voice could shape magic to her will. Would her magic work here? Something in her gut says it may just, but so untwined from her people she must be greatly diminished and she is, for the first time in her life, afraid to try.

"Indoors. Then thy citadel is close at hand?" The last coil of braid tumbles free of her crown and into the water with a weighty splash. Pearls captured in the twisting ropes of it.

She blanches. "There are no others. Only us. Thine own language is new to us. As difficult as the language of the outlanders had been. We are us, there is only one now."

He seems overly concerned with her armor and weaponry and Úennen supposes he must be. But she is naked in a river, and he astride a great beast of burden so there is very little she could do and besides.

She is tired.

Her Voice aches and she is tired.

It occurs to her that she could be Known here. 

“I see...” Glorfindel says, although he doesn’t take her entire meaning. It’s a Mannish turn of phrase for which he entirely blames on Ecthelion’s habit of befriending Men. “What is your name and what battle brings you to Lindon? If you are the only one left of your company, then I would be remiss in my duties if I did not send word ahead to my own people to warn them.” 

Asfaloth shifts beneath him and sighs so heavily his bells start their din again. Glorfindel nearly rolls his eyes. True, there is no fell presence he can sense on either side but he would be more at peace with more information. Caution, he has learned through hard practice, is a friend of victory.

"The final Battle of Ichlowand," she tells him as if he should know it, wringing her braids free of water until the cords of it run clean. "The culmination of the Thirty Years Child War and the final slaying of He who wrought cataclysm upon the land of Ichlowand and the World."

Even still she can feel an ache beneath her sternum. She is halved still and knows it. The wound of her soul aches when she thinks on it so she does not think on it-- instead she ducks beneath the water again until rivulets of black and red run down her face. Her palms scrub free the muck and paint layered on there. She supposes, while she continues bathing without hurry, she could follow this creature on his beast. Indoors to a bath; but the river serves just as well.

Along her ribs her gills flutter, and it is long minutes before she resurfaces.

"We died." She tells him, "We died and our Mother sent us far from our home and we found ourselves awake in the Halls of Mandos."

As clean as her hair will get whilst still being braided she wades toward the shore, "Our people do not share their true names with those not kin." She pauses on the pebbled shore and blinks several times, "Though we are no longer tethered to the Song of our People so then ought we abide our People's Laws?"

She blew out a breath, "We have been called dharkona moj, and Úennen, and u'piir, and e'mira. The last is perhaps most close to our title."

“Mae govannen, E’mira,” he replies because he hasn’t forgotten all his manners. Though he nearly does laugh at the strangeness of her Quenya name:  _ Unnamed _ . It wasn’t a kind thing to call a person, he thought, and wondered how she came by such a non-name. “I’m called Glorfindel; I’m the captain of the guard of the Gray Haven on the Bay of Lhûn , not a league from here.” He makes a broad gesture West, toward the sun and the sea. At the same moment he signals Aias again, a curt motion,  _ Stand down. _

He stares in open fascination at her gills.  _ Gills. And scales, too. With all that golden hair she’s very nearly Erestor’s Lorelai. _ Water spirits such as that made a game of drowning those who visited their shores, though, and this stranger seemed to have no such malice in her, though a great grief dimmed her, that much was clear.

“I think you are very far from home, indeed, to have come to Mandos and then been sent here… but if you have come from Mandos then you’re among friends. I dwelt there lately, give or take a century, after my own city fell. Well, it was my friend’s city more rightly, but I lived there all the same. Would you come with me to Mithlond? We can compare notes on the Lord of Spirits.” 

"A'na'ara Ashta Glorfindel." He is Captain then of his people's guard and if nothing else that speaks to her of his character -- he can be trusted to care about their safety first. She turns to follow his hand and blinks into the sun; it is low in the West and she wonders how it is still so close to dawn. Maybe there are two suns after all and she has just overlooked the second. She draws in a deep breath beneath its warmth. However foreign it might be, it still spreads heat to her heavy bones, and it is a good feeling.

Her flesh prickles and her scales ripple in the light breeze that smells of soil and salt.

"Toward the sea," she breathes out and bends to lift up the soft leathers worn beneath her armor to give them a shake. A small rain of crusted filth scatters the pebbles of the beach. Her mail will have to wait to be cleaned properly.

"We died," she says again, "And our Mother untethered us from the world. We were War. Once. That was our purpose, and now our war is done." She tips her head at him, eyes narrowing slightly, "We will come, for we are curious about this land. The colors are... different from those of our home."

It’s hard not to keep staring-- at the gills, scales, complete lack of a navel, the intentional scars which shape out fearsome beasts all along the line of her short body... and clearly unwanted scars which imply great hanks of flesh were cut from her back and sides once, long ago, such that they have left deep divots that break the line of her ribs inward and the scars are concave. 

The pain must have been incredible.

E’mira is at this point, quite accustomed to the eyes of people on her though she suspects in these circumstances, it less who she is and more what she is that has Glorfindel so fascinated.

In this case: a stranger.

In a belated impulse of chivalry Glorfindel jerks his tabard free and offers it to her: a jerkin of soft grey velvet, layered over cotton, embroidered with fine silver thread with the eight stars of Gil-Galad’s house. 

“Here, you might be a bit warmer for more layers. A storm is due this afternoon.” He’s too polite, still, to tell her that he does not want to smell her armor so close to his face the whole ride back to the city.

She holds the tabard in her hands, thumbs sliding over the stars. The material is silken and strange in her calloused grip. She doesn’t recognize the stars. The fabric is too soft by far. 

She shrugs into it anyway and finds a cord of pearls from her armor to belt it and accepts the hand Glorfindel offers her up onto his oversized mount.

Asfaloth’s willingness to bear a second rider only serves to reinforce Glorfindel’s conviction that E’mira is a friend of some kind or other. At the very least, she is no servant of the Enemy or else his horse, surely, would protest. 

He doesn’t envy E’mira her circumstances, having been in them himself once. Re-embodiment was not as easy as the prophecies made it out to be.

“That will be Aias coming down from the northern path,” he tells E’mira, excusing her presence without explaining it, “She’s one of my best scouts, if a little hasty. This half of the Lhûn is her usual patrol, although the guard will have to find a way to make do without her for the next week. Her cousin in Forlond is getting married.” 

He continues talking like that: to fill air. And he pointedly ignores the many looks of deep concern that Aias casts his way the entire ride back to the city.

Still pondering the stars embroidered over her chest and back, she interrupts him, "Amongst our people, to share the symbol of one's house is to declare them kin."

Glorfindel makes a surprised noise behind her. "Is that so? Well... we elves haven't made a habit of being reborn so I think it might be fair to consider you and I of like kind. I won’t be offended if you decide otherwise, later, but for my part I am more than ready to consider you a friend."

The declaration makes Aias go bug-eyed for a moment, though to her credit she resolves her face to neutrality quickly. While impulsivity is not one of Glorfindel's more notorious traits, a certain eccentricity is, and here he sees fit to embrace that reputation although he does grant the scout a brief explanation, "It isn't every day that people walk out of Mandos' halls." It does nothing for the scout's obvious concern. 

There is nothing Mannish about E'mira-- not in her carriage or her dress or her speech or her form. She is certainly neither orc nor elf and while she is short and incredibly dense, easily as heavy as a grown Noldo, she is no dwarf.  _ Mithrandir might know, _ Glorfindel thinks, although how one went about simply contacting one of the Wise was beyond him. Such creatures came and went as they pleased; the closest the people of the world got was expressing gratitude for their seemingly random machinations. (Or fear, comes the darker thought, for Sauron was once  _ Mairon _ , and counted as an emissary of a Vala still.)

They move swiftly and E’mira stays quiet, lost in thought and the melodic vibrations of Glorfindel speaking behind her. There are none alive who have ever declared her kin, neither in Illyria nor Arda, though she thinks perhaps her Mikhail may have wished to before the end, before she became War and before Nawalnica.

Before she sank her homeland and let herself be lost to the Breach in an endless living death.

She greets Aias with a toothy smile that draws attention to a thin scar stretching along her left cheek from lip to torn, foreshortened ear. "Our scouts were much the same: young and keen to be known." She inclines her head toward Aias, "Blessings of the Sea and Stars on your... cousin." 

_ Cousin _ . There is a word which rings familiar through the foreign language on her tongue despite how her traditional blessings sound strange so diminished. She would Speak the blessing with proper magnitude but something stays her. A forgotten patience or reticence. 

Aias reaches for a smile, delighted despite herself at the reverence in this stranger’s voice. "Thank you, lady, that is a high blessing."

* * *

The rain comes in from the sea right on time. Asfaloth is well on his way to being stabled when it begins and the gossip will have reached Gil-Galad before dinner that Glorfindel has brought some stranger into the city before dinner. It’s probably a crime to keep E’mira away from the King’s company but he remembers his early weeks of re-embodiment; he had hardly wanted to be presented at court, he wouldn’t have been able to think of it, and these people were known to him! He was lucky that Galadriel had let him hide away in her fair house for so long.

The house  _ he  _ keeps in the heart of Mithlond is far more comfortable than the barracks he prefers to reside in. It was modest, by the standards of kings, built with fine white stone to have tall windows that caught the sun, and open rooms, but too much for him. Some of them, those he used most, were furnished with the offerings and insistent presents of the Noldor but more stood empty. There was a reverence in the hearts of other elves when he mets them-- even Gil-Galad whom he had known in Gondolin! -- that he could hardly abide. It left him unable to refuse what gifts they might offer. After all the Valar meant their prescience as a gift, too, and he hadn’t denied Them.

E’mira, for her part, rejoices in the rain. So close to the sea the salt is thick in the air as it fills her lungs. A thrumming hum starts deep in her diaphragm and jangles up from her throat. It is a joyful, wordless sound that her breathing makes. To be near the sea is to be relieved.

She lets herself be led, paying only half a mind to what Glorfindel says while she contemplates this citadel of Mithlond. The architecture is strange but beautiful in its own fashion. From color to stone to maker she recognizes little. 

He leads E’mira to the kitchen. It’s far too large a space for a bachelor but his larder is hardly empty. He finds fruit and smoked fish and hard cheese and piles them into the center of the kitchen worktable without ceremony. “I don’t know what you like to eat but it looks like I have a little of everything.” He’s surprised to see it; he’s paid little attention to his household’s stores of late. “Saevel won’t be around again until morning but when he gets here I’ll send him to get you something else to wear. We can have your armor cleaned properly. And there are taps in the washroom,” he’s pleased with himself for that addition: an invention he’d insisted be scavenged from the ruins of Gondolin, “you can draw a bath as hot as you please.” 

She lets her fingers run along the walls and cabinets of the room; it’s warmer here and smells of grain. 

At the food he produces her eyes wide in curiosity. Her second lids slip open without her having to think about it; they let in richer light; she can see that the colors of these fruits are stranger still than the trees had been. 

The light in her eyes makes Glorfindel gasp; it is not the Trees, it is a wilder, greener thing, but its nature is similar enough to be startling. She is not of Arda, that he had seen, but now he thinks that she is not even a creation of the Valar.

Oblivious to his wonder, she lifts a fruit and breathes it in, there is nothing here familiar to her, "We do not consume unliving flesh. Our people survived on the fruit of our lands and the great ooliir harvests."She frowns, "I think in your tongue they are called nuts?" Translating between the language of her birth and the language so casually inserted in her head is… Peculiar.

Had she the means, she would scrawl it all out in script to see the differences, but her own hand would not be known to these strange “elves”. 

"We give our thanks," she concludes.

She doubts the water will go hot enough for her, when the time comes for a bath, but it will be an adventure to find out all the same. She turns inward with her thoughts and peels the fruits apart with her fingers and eats them in neat movements and military-efficiency until all but the fish is gone.

* * *

The bath Glorfindel shows her is fine indeed but it speaks of a people trying to tame the water: it is level with the rest of the dwelling, the floor is tiled and filled with pipes whose metal she can hear as it relaxes with the heat. But there are many more plants in this room than elsewhere in the house-- it is not what she would consider a warm room suited to growing things, but warmer still than the kitchen had been-- and they lean in gratitude toward her presence. Though they are still oddly-colored and festooned with such soft flowers one might be able to sleep on them, she greets them with soft songs in return.

She is correct in her assumption that the "taps" in the washroom do not bring the water near hot enough for her, but she sinks into the deep basin designed for that purpose all the same. Having rinsed the worst of the filth from herself in the river, she floats in the water and breathes carefully with her mouth. She finds honeyed soap and begins the arduous process of scrubbing herself clean. A memory comes to her unbidden: Mikhail admonishing his bright-eyed daughter Joanna, whom he had judged finished too quickly with her bath after a week spent hunting, “You’ll grow potatoes behind your ears! What will the Queen think?” 

E’mira has very little ear left to wash behind but she does so carefully, mindful of the scars where delicate fins used to be.

It requires emptying the bath thrice before she is satisfied and her hair gleams liquid gold-- though liquid gold would surely weigh less.

With the length of it gathered up in her arms she redresses in the tabard before venturing forth to comb through her hair, pins and pearls and crown collected under her free arm. This would be easier if she had the proper number of arms but she is resigned to only bearing two. She sat again at the kitchen table and let her amassed tools and baubles sprawl in a collection of shell and jewel brightness. The kitchen is the only room she is familiar with and the only room with near enough space to accommodate the sheer volume of her hair.

She did not have attendants for long enough to grow accustomed to having her hair braided for her, and the only styles she knows are those best for battle, and so that is what she chooses. She twines her hair into segments and braids it all back up, twining it through the crown she had woken in this world wearing. It's weight familiar and comforting atop her head, for all that she is no ruler here.

Glorfindel does his best not to hover after they've eaten together although he feels a stranger in his own house now that he has to take stock of it through the lens of another person occupying it. He finds himself a book just the same and a soft lamp to read by and does his best to let her go about her business. 

But the music E'mira makes-- seemingly as a function of breathing rather than any kind of intent-- is contagious and houses such as his were built to conduct song. 

He hums in absent harmony while he reads. He does stop, though, out of curiosity when she emerges from doing her best to test the furnace's capacity for heating water and makes her way straight to the kitchen once more. He trails her to watch as she unloops her wet hair from around her shoulders like so much rope and begins to work it. 

There's enough to be considered long on an elf two feet taller than herself; it would drag the ground by several feet if she left it loose. There is a clear weight to the braids she weaves and Glorfindel marks them with a sense of study. It recalls the habits of dwarves, to a degree, the intentionality of each twist and loop she places and the ultimate weaving is the sort of thing he would expect of the Vanyar: they whose lives in Valinor are so long and untroubled they had little else to do in the days of the trees but devise cleverer and cleverer means of dressing their hair.

"We're spoiled for kings, usually, a queen will be a novelty," he remarks then starts for the fire. "Do you drink tea, E'mira? I have some from the heights of Himring; I'm sure you've never tasted anything like it."

She smiles wanly. It sits ill on her face; she has spent more time baring her teeth. "It has been a long time since last we sat athrone anything more than the Breach." she hums again, if only to hear the sound of it and because she had heard Glorfindel harmonizing earlier and it had been sweet. Stranger than anything the people of her own world had managed but sweet all the same.

"We are certain we have not. Beyond wine and blood there is ill our people consumed to slake our thirst." She runs her nails through her hair and finishes winding the last of the braids up. It is nothing special, the style she wears but not with her hair piled up atop the crown of her head to spill down her back, the ends of the braids brush the small of her back.

"Our people held deep significance in the consumption of certain foods and liquids. In honor of Karesh, our brother and ferrier of the dead."

“Ah, then you’re in for a treat; the first of many, I suppose, if you are used to only such comfort as wine and blood can offer. Himring’s summers are exceptionally wet and so they boast of their teas despite the short growing season; if you believe the locals, it’s the cold that makes them brew up sweet.” 

He takes his time preparing the pot while the kettle comes to a boil over the hearth, answering E’mira’s humming with more of his own while he does, turning the tune to a familiar melody that if it had words would have been a cradle-rhyme about herbs. The tea brews up smelling earthy and as sweet as promised but a minute of rummaging in the pantry turns up a jar of honey, too. He adds a healthy dollop of it to his own cup before pouring for the both of them. “You should try it plain, first, but have as much honey as you like. The bees have been generous this year.” 

"We came from war. We imagine anything would be a... treat to us now." She will confess to herself a curiosity and secret delight at the prospect. The fruit she had eaten earlier had only whetted her appetite and had all been delicious.

She had too few memories of food as appetizing.

"Our home did not have seasons, we think is the word? Ichlowand was hot and wet at all times. Though there were times when the tide was lower and the air heated so much it sapped all moisture. Those were the turnings we all ventured into the depths. Certain creatures found better prey in the dry than the wet. It was safer for the surviving children."

She curls her palms around the mug. She has only three fingers left of her right hand and scarring on her left so severe the skin has taken on a shiny gold green sheen. The heat of the mug eases a soreness she hadn’t even noticed. She takes a slow sip and her eyes close. It is good. She decides she will try it again later with the honey. The loamy scent reminds her of Tsuhadir, of the temple that rose from the sea there.

Then, apropos of nothing, “If your Karesh is akin to our Mandos and he is your brother, then are you a Vala?” It was easier to be out with it rather than fret too long over wording and lose the opportunity to ask.

A moment waxes into a minute before she responds: "We do not know this word,  _ Vala _ . Karesh was brother to Idryalla, the mother of our line. When Idryalla's brother-husband fled to the lands beyond seeing and wrought destruction upon the peoples there Karesh aided him-- but only to a point and then he petitioned Death for forgiveness. As repentance, Karesh forwent all sustenance so that he might warden the souls of all dead to the  _ Owtirnul _ ." The word rings in many voices and the walls shake a little before she defines it, "We think it is something like thine  _ Halls of Mandos _ . A place to reflect before the soul is returned unto the Womb of the Mother and birthed once more unto the world."

She holds the mug close to her face to breathe in the steam.

"Before Idryalla, our world knew not Death, we did not die. We were a people unending. But such is not the proper way of things and so Death came to Illyria and Idryalla brought forth our people onto land to--" 

There are a number of words for what her people were meant to do. None of them are entirely correct. Her people were  _ soldiers _ . She does not think they were ever intended to shepherd or safekeep the other beings of the worlds, only to fight that which came through the Breach. But  _ soldiers _ was still too small a word.

She settles on: "To keep safe all corners of the world from that which would sow destruction and ruin beyond measure and Death. Things that could... Unmake the Mother’s Creation. That is what we and our brethren were tasked with slaying."

Glorfindel sits across from her with his mug of tea and scarcely breathes at the much-abridged tale. He tries to map her words onto his own knowledge of the history of Arda. It is, of course, impossible to do starting with the fact that there are no High Queens among the Eldar and running right up to the fact, still present in his mind, that _ E’mira has gills _ . She can’t possibly be a creature of Eru but Eru has seen fit to allow her here, in the sphere of the world, all the same. 

“Your people sound like the Eldar, but completely different.” He laughs at himself. “We were deathless once, too, when we dwelt across the sea. We brought death to ourselves, though, and only have ourselves to blame for the grief we know now.” He pauses, pondering suddenly a philosophical question that hadn’t ever much weighed on him: for what purpose were the Eldar made? But the answer is strikingly clear, “I think we were only created to delight our creator; we were never given any task, as a whole, though a few of us have been given vague instructions now and again. Was it your brother-- Karesh-- who brought you to Mandos?” 

_ (Idryalla _ , he assumes, is a sister to E’mira, who was married to someone different than Karesh but also still a brother of hers by some relation. A step-brother, maybe? And a kinslayer in his own right by the sound of it, if not something much worse.)

E’mira nods in approval of the new word-form, " _ Deathless _ . Yes. Though our Mother Goddess was beset with grief enough when we became deathful that she nearly cleaved the worlds, and Death himself, in twain. Death would not be turned away so easily, though, and our existence was made small."

The history of her people is one that she holds dear to her. It has survived the countless years she has lived and unlived intact.

"It..." she blew out a breath, "It is a complicated telling, how we came to Mandos, and we do not know all of it. It begins with Idryalla who bore the children of Him'nok. A'ltira... templar. Of the Mother Goddess. Him'nok is  _ tol'ytelmineau _ .” Again, the crystal-glass and porcelain in the cupboards sings. There is no word in the elvish tongue for Him’nok but she strives for it anyway: “A being apart from the Mother and of the Mother, in the shape of the great  _ kitesh  _ of Nihira.” The close-wrong word finally turns over in her mind, “ _ Dragon _ . But larger and more intelligent. Capable of weaving great works with their Voice. Him'nok's was a Song that carved great divides deep beneath the waters of the world."

There’s scarcely a moment to try to work out how a dragon can fit into any story as anything but a fell-beast-- because the way E’mira uses  _ dragon _ it clearly does not mean what Glorfindel is accustomed to it meaning-- before the melody of history swells into a tide too strong to swim against. Not that Glorfindel is so inclined. There is too much to watch. The steam rising from her mug begins forming shapes as she speaks: creatures of sea and light, fin and wing shift in the air to illustrate her words. The tea begins to boil; great credit is due to the craftsman who fired her mug because it does not shatter.

"Idryalla was sister-wife of Itemiel -- He of whom we do not Speak, for it is he who caused the Great Cataclysm of the World."

She hums, "All rulers of Ichlowand are of Idryalla's Line. It is best perhaps to say that we are all Idryalla that Was. Our People carry our entire history in our blood and minds. When One ruler passes, the next becomes she who was." Her toes scuff the floor, "When we, ourselves, were born to the world... our mother was... Usurper. Thief of the throne of Ichlowand. She had wrought many sacrilegious acts upon us all. It was our duty to bear that burden… We were born... gods-touched."

E’mira focuses intently on the steam in her cup, uncomfortable with the confession she makes next, “We Became… for a time...  _ War _ . Until we sought to -"

_ Guilt _ . That was the name of this feeling. "We were selfish and sank our home into the depths. We told ourselves it might close the Breach but we knew it would not… but that is where we stayed, a living death, until one of our line brought an end to Itemiel. That was our final Death."

She finally glances up at Glorfindel. There is no judgement in his face, no condemnation. Indeed, it would seem that he does not notice at all what she thinks she deserves. He only listens, as rapt a pupil as any of the jezda could have hoped to teach, and the depths of his eyes are unreadable to her.

"Our Mother... should have Unmade us. To sever our tie to Itemiel, for all of Idryalla's line bear the weight of his soul, for once we were one being beneath the Sky Vault, deep within the swell of the Mother's Womb."

One of her hands clenched into a fist, "She untethered us instead and when we awoke it was to Mandos in your Namo’s Halls. We do not know why we came to be here or how. Only that we are here and without purpose or connection. No kin. No Song. A veil was brought down between us and the memory of all that we were."

She concludes, “We are Diminished and… and we are glad of it?”

While it is a short telling it is underscored with so much sound that the very air hums against itself in its wake. 

With tears in his eyes he can only think that he’s grateful she didn’t try to really make a song of her story; if she had then surely the whole city would have wept. Or maybe it would have just broken free from the whole of Beleriand and fallen into the sea. 

“There is as much peace and freedom in being so far from what you know and love as there is sorrow,” he agrees. A few tears fall, unbidden. He had tried, for his part, to go back to Valinor once. He had not been able to withstand it; he was too much changed by fire and the will of the Valar. “It’s very nearly unspeakable but here we are, speaking of it.” 

He wipes a hand along his cheek. Takes hold of the body of his mug of tea, now almost too cool to bother with. “I am sorry that you are so alone here and that I awoke the grief of it, E’mira, please forgive me.” 

E'muira nods, a hum catching the folds of her throat. She blinks double eye lids, first vertical and then horizontal before shaking her head.

"It was many great turnings and tides ago. Both Idryalla that was and our own thrice death." She drains the mug and slides it toward him a question in her eyes.

"We have learned that once you set the course across the tide, there is no return. The Sea is ever-changing and we within it too. Even for mine own people, changeless as for aeons, we could not return to that which once we were. Nor to the home which had once held us close and dear."

"Even for ourselves, there was no Place, nor current, which could have borne us home again. We were born beneath a dark sky, when suns and moons aligned and darkened Illyria's sky and cast a shadow of the Usurper far across the divide of Tsuha’ama and Tsuhadir. Farther still past the red range which once did hold Itemiel captive...  Long is the reach of those who would see the world’s descent into Void and Blackness."

Green eyes alight on the tear and she frowns, "Why are you leaking?"

That startles a laugh out of him and with it the tearful moment passes as if it was only a cloud passing in front of the sun. “Any of our bards should love to meet you, I think; you speak so fairly,” teasing and completely sincere all at once. “Do your people not cry? I suppose below the sea you wouldn’t need it, would you?” 

He has a kind laugh and E’mira decides she likes it and for that she will call him kin, regardless of their differences. He has clothed her, fed her, and offered shelter in his house. It is enough, for her people's reckoning.

“When we were War, it was often commented that we spoke strange. The men of the outlands could not bear the treble of our Voice and their tongue sat strange on our teeth.”

She tilted her head, eyes narrowing, “No. We do not. T’would be a waste of our life water.”

“I’m afraid that we elves lack such mighty control over ourselves.” He rests his chin in his hand, wondering at her, “We’re moved to tears mostly by grief, ours, shared, or others’-- although sometimes by joy, too.” 

He wonders if she knows the same stars or if those, too, will prove to be different in her experience. He tempers his exuberance, if only just barely, with another non-sequitur, “The days are long here in the South but the stars at night are brilliant. Maybe after you’ve rested some we should see them; I have a friend who makes a habit of mapping them and I think you and he will have much to discuss.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Who needs accuracy when you have gods messing around with whole universes?


	3. On History

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize to any lore scholars or linguists out there for the abuses I deliver upon Tolkien's languages and the faint horror most will find at Ichlowandian.

The rumors that the House of the Golden Flower has a guest are neither subtle nor few. Glorfindel had turned up with last night’s storm, they said, with a woman in his company! She was strange and like no elf or human seen in Lindon’s borders! When she spoke the walls of the city sang! She had come from the North! No, the East! No, from the sea itself! 

Saevel shrugged all such questions and theories off as he waded through the early morning marketplace. The city was still drying out from the gentle storm the night before and the paving stones in the streets were scattered with fallen blossoms and leaves. It was almost a pretty enough sight to excuse the relentless gossip. Saevel had no time. Not when he has a basket of possible hand-me-downs for said guest to sift through, a household budget that Glorfindel has yet to review, and a nibling in tow. 

The things he did for his sister and her wife could not be excused by the limits of love because child-minding was a task, he was certain, that went even beyond love. He loved Aewe, he did. His nibling was a gift to all the world, as all children were! But there was some fey energy that found itself concentrated in elves too young to sit a horse that made them absolutely feral. It was not evil, certainly, but it was also not wholly good for it attracted them to all manner of dangers and made them prone to biting hard and often. 

Little Aewe was barely twenty years old and the spitting image of their Avari mother: dark haired and grey-eyed. They were nowhere near the glorious decade of fifty when, it was foretold by their parents, that they would be able to be reasoned with. Saevel longed for the years to pass faster. They stood knee-high to a war horse and would continue to be so small for many summers to come, filled with nothing but relentless inquiry, the cocky sureness that came from having a skeleton composed almost entirely of soft cartilage, and a rambunctious desire to climb everything in sight. 

To soothe the lattermost point of pain, Saevel had devised a harness, the same ilk one might use for a sight-hound, and a mechanism for attaching Aewe to his belt. It made running errands much less messy. Aewe had not yet worked out a way to wriggle free from it, despite their extreme flexibility.

They sprinted ahead of him into Glorfindel’s house with a delighted shriek. “I want to see the faerie!” 

“Aewe, have mercy, I am an old man,” he beseeched, as they reached the end of their tether and jerked to a stumbling stop that landed them squarely on their rear. They bounced a little before scrambling upright again. 

“ _ Where is she? _ ” They demanded at the same ear-splitting volume, then proceeded to walk around him, as far away as the line attaching them to his belt would permit, poking their nose into cupboards and under furniture, as if they expected Glorfindel’s strange guest to be hiding beneath a sofa.

Saevel sighed. He had, once upon a time, been a smith. No amount of running and leaping would pull him off balance. He stepped, high and nimble, over the lead every time Aewe circled around his legs. 

Then, just as Saevel found a likely place to set the basket of clothes and the ledger, Glorfindel called from the kitchen, “ _ Is that a little bird I hear _ ?”

Aewe leapt off the back of a chair, upsetting it, “It is Aewe! I brought my uncle! We came to see the faerie!” 

“Their uncle came to see the master of the house about his annual budget,” he corrects, pausing to right the toppled chair-- and to make Aewe endure the pause that required, “and I brought some things for your guest. You didn’t tell me what she might like so I just robbed my sister’s wife.” 

Glorfindel stuck his head out from the kitchen, “Oh, good, then you can help me make sure I don’t ruin this bread,” as if bread had anything to do with anything at all. 

“You’re going to divine your household expenses from the yeast, I assume?” 

Aewe tugged at the end of their lead, though Saevel would not be pulled any faster than he wanted to go, and he was of a mind to meander after his employer into the warmth of the kitchen.

“I know I haven’t overspent anything, isn’t that enough?” 

“You’ve hardly spent anything!” 

“I live alone! What am I meant to do, buy a ship?” It was a bitter joke behind a merry laugh.

Aewe gave up their huffing and straining to climb onto the kitchen table so that they were eye level with Glorfindel, “You could buy me toys from the Naugrim!” 

Saevel didn’t dignify  _ that  _ with a response. He turned his attention to the oven instead with a mind to rescue the poor bread loaf Glorfindel seemed intent on torturing. “Dough is not steel,” he admonished.

Meanwhile, Glorfindel gave Aewe’s proposal the whole of his attention. “Yes, I suppose I could, but how would that be fair to the other children in Mithlond, if I spent all of my money on you? And, furthermore, should you really call the mighty Dwarrow such a rude name if you like what they make so much?”

That set Aewe frowning so hard their ears drooped, which were still so large at their young age as to be an imposition to their aptitude for chaos (and a boon to their caregivers, who were not afraid at all to haul them up by them in a bid to stop them destroying the fine china, for elf children’s ears were not yet too sensitive and as easy to bend and fold as the rest of their bodies).

“I trust you implicitly in matters of finance, Saevel,” Glorfindel said, because apparently, the truth needed restating, “but for the peace of your heart I will review the ledger you’ve so diligently kept this past year. I would surely be a pauper without you.”

* * *

E'mira has not slept on furnishings so soft in ages long enough that she can hardly recall them. She is certain her childhood held nothing of such softness and from what little she might glean from the black cloud of memory, even her Warring days, there was ill to afford such comfort.

Moreover, she can scarcely recall ever being afforded the luxury of such... laziness. The sun, still alone, is already in the sky when she comes fully awake.

Oh, that Huragan could see her now! What would the fearsome priestess have said?

Her ears twitch as screeching reaches the upper floors and the chambers Glorfindel had been all too enthusiastic at giving her. It takes her several moments to untangle herself from the veritable avalanche of blankets that she piled up on top of herself wrapped herself in during the night like a legless, coldblooded  _ tosaa  _ burrowing deep into the marshy dirt seeking warmth.

The pearls in her hair clatter together. Her braids have unwound themselves from the tall knot she tied them into before she took her rest but there is no propriety to stand upon here. Here, she is not Fah'ti, not a queen of anything. She drags the softest of the blankets around her shoulders, hair sweeping down to brush just so across the floor, before she goes in search of all the noise.

She finds Glorfindel in the kitchen with another elf, and a... much smaller elf attached to a rope.

The sight startles a laugh out of her, "Our own people were as predisposed to lashing our children thusly. The waters of our homeland were often tempestuous and the children curious for the marvels found beneath the surf."

Glorfindel is already accustomed to the way every pane and piece of Noldor-made glass in the house sings whenever E’mira makes certain sounds or says certain words in her mothertongue. He is, perhaps, too quick to adapt: Aewe falls off the kitchen table in surprise. Saevel stops whatever he’d been starting-- an admonishment about oven temperatures, most likely-- to gape. 

E’mira is not much taller than the wee one but still she crouches to inspect the child. "You have a Voice which carries well. It would do to learn control of it lest you find it has caused harm to those innocent." Her own voice trembles in the air. 

“Good advice,” Glorfindel agrees, dusting off his hands to retrieve Saevel’s ledger and page through it. Presumably, the bread will be Saevel’s domain henceforth and he is glad to pass on that responsibility. Still, he leaves traces of flour on the finely-bound pages. “You should listen to E’mira, little bird, she isn’t an elf and knows many things that we don’t.”

Struck shy, Aewe inches closer to their uncle. With wide eyes they start their litany, “Are you a faerie? At market they said you made the street sing in the rain and you’re from the river and you’re made of moonlight and that you magicked Glorfindel and that’s why he brought you home.”

E'mira smiles, sharp-toothed but polite all the same, finding herself delighted at the presence of a child. She had seen none before her death. Not any of them, and  _ Nawalnica…  _ even had she been born, she would have come into the world long after her mother had perished. How E'mira manages to not reach for the girl child is a question for the ages, her shy step behind the taller elf gives E'mira pause enough that she straightens and finds a seat to settle herself while she searches for the right words to answer the onslaught of questions.

Another delighted laugh shakes through her and her eyes crinkle at the corners. "We are not, though the men of the outlands often referred to us and our own people as such for our peculiarities. We are Ichlowandian," a pause and she dips down, "Our people's Song-name is  _ Anasiyran _ . For our Mother Goddess once had a name and that name was All."

She winked and sat back up and the duvet fell down from her shoulders to around her waist. Beneath it she was bare, the tabard finally having given up to the almost stink that had clung to her skin before repeated washings.

She doesn't seem to notice or care that she is all but naked before these beings, "Our people are known for the  _ aoru _ , The Voice and the Speech," she touched a hand to her own throat, three digits of it stroking along the jagged raised mark bisecting it, "Our language and people is one of many voices and from it comes our power." She cast a glance at Glorfindel before humming, "We are from the Sea, or rather of the Sea and there is no moonlight in us, nor any magick that has bewitched your kin, little voice."

“Not a single unwelcome spell in sight,” Glorfindel confirms. 

“If an  _ Ichlowandian _ ,” they pronounce the new word as carefully as they can, “isn’t a faerie-- and you don’t have a beard so you can’t be a Nau-- a Dwarrow--” 

Saevel, in a moment of inspiration, unclips Aewe from his belt and attaches them to Glorfindel instead. Then, he left the kitchen to go find the basket of borrowed clothes he’d come with.

“ _ Dwarrowdam _ ,” Glorfindel supplied, focused more closely on the ledger now. (There was little to read and none of it was amiss, but he had promised his attention to it and so it will have his attention, even if he notes little more than the steady margins (pin-straight), Saevel’s penmanship (surpassingly fine), and the accuracy of his figures (unquestioningly perfect).)

“-- And they don’t sail anyway. So what is an Ichlowandian?” At her invitation they stray from their uncle’s legs to look more closely at the shimmering scales-- and scar, they’ve never seen an elf with a scar at all-- on her throat. “What’s the Speech? Is that what makes the glass ring?” 

"We are..." E'mira's nose wrinkled and she reached for a pitcher of water and a tall crystal glass. She filled the glass and set it close to the edge of the work table for Aewe to see easily.

"This is a telling passed down from the fi'uria. The priestesses of our world-..." Something in her voice grew heavy and the air in the kitchen grew still. Glorfindel set the ledger aside and Saevel came back to listen at the door. Elves were no strangers to Tales and always sought new ones.

"Once the world was only water, and it hung suspended from the sky vault by starlight." The water within the glass began swirling and in the bubbles images reflected her words. The crystal all began a soft hum of noise.

"Anasiyra, the Mother Goddess was born outside of this, at the Beginning of All Things and of those Things, she Sang many great works into Being."

"Our world sat at the seat of a great Breach in the All, from that Breach came the Nothingness. In the swell of the water, she made the First Children. Though we were greater then and without death. We, her children, were not created in her image. Born were we as echoes of the All which our Mother had seen and foresaw, crafted in great shapes it slid through currents and swells alike, to dive into the deepest crevices of the Breach to seek out the Void which crept through."

The kitchen trembled and water rose from the glass and the pitcher. Aewe groped for a chair and sat before E’mira without ceremony or a hint of anything except awe. They looked between E’mira, who hummed with living light as she spoke, and the water which lifted itself like smoke to form her words.

"We were kin and kindred. Siblings and lovers, all. We made war on one another as much as we made war on the nothings which sought to Unmake the great Makings of the Mother Goddess."

"We of her Children have long memories. We recall the Beginning of our Existence, though it is a long one. For our world has been made and remade a hundred fold. Vast peoples risen and fallen, given back to the womb of our Mother and her teeming waters. Still, we her First Children were ageless, and so we fought."

"One dawn, when our suns rose in the West, and cast great beams of green and golden light across the waves, Death came to Illyria, and in his Coming he brought an End to our Agelessness, for there can be no beginnings without end." 

The water collapsed back into the glass with a great splash. Aewe gasped, as shocked as they imagined the first people of Illyria were shocked to know what it meant to die.

"Our Mother took shape. Many shapes, some small and clever, others great and fearsome, and upon Death she wrought her grief for his ending of her children. For it is said Death did not know the mistake he would bring by doing so. As penance he granted our Mother three gifts."

She scooped some flour into one hand and blew a humming, multi-tonal breath whistling across it so that it created yet more shapes: islands on the water. "The first, swaths of land rose up from the depths upon which feet could tand, and great things could grow. Flowers, and fruit, and children's laughter."

"The next, was an End itself, a place for all beings to make their final rest in peace, when the Mother decided they were ready."

"And the third--" Now from the flour floating through the air the shapes of Mir and Bezlad, the fey guardians of her house twining around one another, "The presh'emir. What men of the outlands would come to call  _ seawolves _ . Once, I was called the Wolf Queen, for no other child of Fah'ti bore two such creatures into the Making."

The wolves disappeared in a puff of flour. She turned her attention to the islands once more. "Upon the land which would soon be called Tsu'hadir, Idryalla, ruler of our kin and maker of our line dragged herself ashore. She changed her shape to reflect our Mother. Where once great fins and claws were, replaced by feet and legs. Many-armed and ferocious, as the most vicious squall, and to our Mother she swore to protect and shepherd all of her Children in our new life."

"Beneath the Sea you cannot call out as we are now, but you can Speak, and to be heard above the Current your Voice must carry, and ours was an ancient Sound which above the waters shook the world and shuddered starlight from the ropes which held it high, and this is why our Voice shakes all things."

Saevel is the first to move, setting the basket of clothes on the floor at E’mira’s feet, “When you’re ready to dress,  _ heruin _ ,” then taking the tidy ledger back from Glorfindel. As he does, in an undertone so soft any creature but an elf would miss it, he whispers, “You must tell someone,” and his meaning is terribly plain.

Glorfindel blinks off the delighted awe of a new tale to sigh through his nose and fix Saevel with an exasperated look. There is a kinship between himself and E’mira that is barely a day old; he doesn’t want to relinquish it to the inspection of fearful lords and the High King of the Noldor just yet. He doesn’t want to think of the politicking and persuasion that will be necessary to make others understand what he knows implicitly: that E’mira is harmless despite her strangeness. 

Before he can say anything, though, a gurgling noise distracts the both of them.

“I’m hungry,” Aewe announces, but for the first time in years they don’t shout it. Instead they cast about until they spy a bowl of fruit and heave themself across the table to drag it closer, smearing flour down the front of their clothes. They crunch their way through half an apple before they decide, their mouth still half-full, “You should be named Istoneth.” They pause to swallow then ask, “Or is it Pengolodh, emel-hawn? I think Istoneth is prettier.”

“Lady E’mira knows a great deal of history,” Saevel advises, after some consideration, “so you might call her  _ Pengolodh _ , but if you think  _ Istoneth  _ sounds better, then it is not wrong to call her teacher instead of loremaster.” 

“Are you hungry, Istoneth?” They pick through the bowl for the brightest apple and make a show of shining it on their sleeve before offering it to her. There is a smudge of flour across it.

Saevel's interruption is well-timed. It pulls E'mira from a reverie of memory and sadness and she shakes her head before reaching down to pull whatever is topmost in the basket up and fit it over her head. 

It is a shift-like dress in deep green. The fabric is soft like the fur of an  _ a'usyru _ . It catches the light in swathes and the texture is so curious and compelling she runs her hand up and down it for several moments.

"We have never been teacher. Our kenning, E'mira, means something close to  _ guardian _ . We have been called many things, all titles. Our people guard their kennings. For to give name to something is to grant it power, and to give one's name to another is to give power over."

She tapped Aewe's nose with a fingertip, "We were titled  _ Fah'ti  _ by our people, which in your tongue means 'first daughter of the mother of all'. This was how we called all ruler's of Ichlowand and her peoples. Had we lived long enough in our world among our own, perhaps we may have become  _ fi'uria _ . Priestess, and raised a generation of  _ jezda  _ at our temple at the Mother's Hand.  _ Tsu'ha'ama  _ rested at the very point, and rose from the water a great ringing jewel."

"But it was not to be, in our time all the children of our people were slain." She plucked the piece of fruit from the little one's offering hand and levelled an intent stare on Aewe, before reaching forward to brush the smudge of flour free from their skin.

"After we break our fast I shall teach you a game, it is one we were told was taught to the littlest  _ li'mar  _ before they had finished cutting their milk teeth."

* * *

The game turns out, as far as Glorfindel can tell, to be jacks, played with a ball that she produces from the gear she stored upstairs and a collection of small sparkling stones that he suspects are uncut emeralds. It is a test of both dexterity and basic sums because E’mira insists that Aewe count what they manage to snatch up between bounces of the pale rubber ball. What E’mira is doing with a relative fortune in uncut emeralds hung from her belt to use as a child’s toy is beyond him.

“They’ve never been so intent on learning anything,” Saevel says, awed, kneading at another loaf of bread. Glorfindel had mixed far too much flour into his own attempts and now there would be a great excess to be shared. Saevel counted himself lucky that he didn’t have much to do beyond minding Aewe today. Typically, minding Aewe required all of his attention for a day plus the next day’s reserves of attention as well-- but E’mira had them ensorceled with her fond tones and teaching songs and so Saevel found himself free to relax... Or rescue his employer from an excess of raw dough, as the case may be. “You’ve made a very strange friend indeed.” 

“Maybe it’s just that nothing has ever challenged Aewe sufficiently.” 

“You really believe that? After they took a chunk out of you last spring because they were  _ bored _ and wanted to see what would happen?” 

Through the wide window cut into one wall of the kitchen he can see Aewe and E’mira sat across from each other in the middle of the sunniest part of the courtyard. It’s overgrown enough by now to be considered a garden. The air is growing dense with blooming honeysuckle and lilac; by the end of the week there will be a host of bees to watch in afternoons. Glorfindel wonders, watching the two of them play, if he should hire a gardener.

“They’re a child,” he shrugs with all the carelessness of a person who has never been solely responsible for the raising of a child. “We were all terrors when we were small. It isn’t as if anyone taught our parents how to rear children.” He paused and considered Saevel’s relative youth, his kin, his lineage. “Well, none of us Noldor, at any rate.”

“And who taught  _ her _ ?” 

The lord of the house-- such as it was, a half-occupied villa without the designation of  _ home _ \-- continues to lean against the counter on his elbows, careless of how his hair trails into the flour spread across the countertop. “Not her own parents, I assure you. By the sound of it she had many teachers; surely that’s better than just two? You said it yourself: your nibling has never been so well-behaved for so long. I’d wager she could keep them busy and content all day if you let her try it.” 

“And I suppose the city guard will get along without its captain while you play host to a complete stranger?”

He doesn’t look at Saevel or so much as acknowledge the stern look being given to him. “I will speak to the king as soon as he has time for me.” He finally looks away from Aewe and E’mira. “Don’t worry so much. I may be useless at household accounting and baking but I know a thing or two about evil. E’mira is new to the world and she is greatly wounded in spirit but she is not a danger to us.”

“What has she said to give you such confidence?” 

“Nothing. Not a thing. But she was sent here by the Valar, as I was, and that is as high a mark of character as one can get, I think.” Before Saevel can resolve this newest turn of shock Glorfindel pushes away from the countertop and claps his hands. “Well! I think that settles it. I’m off to beg an audience with the king. You and Aewe are welcome to stay as long as you like but don’t worry about E’mira. She can handle herself if she gets too bored of this empty place.” And he strides out of the house, from the kitchen door, through the courtyard with a line of flour across his shirt at the small of his back.

* * *

Aewe proved to be an avid student, for all their energy, and E'mira was as engrossed in the counting game as the hatchling who sat across from her. Her keen green eyes took in the myriad differences between the child and the elder "Elves": Aewe was primarily rounded on all their edges and they moved with a fluidity and the occasional backbending joint that suggested their limbs were not so solid as an adults. They would be long years yet before they grew into their ears and eyes, she thought, and their teeth seemed sharper than an adult Elf's-- although they were nothing like an Ichlowandian hatchling's first set of needle teeth. She remembered, vividly, her sister-daughter Mia and the day she'd begun to grow her milk-teeth. A mild day on the isles pierced by the frightened shrieking of a child whose lungs were new to the air and who had not been properly prepared for the fact of her needle teeth eventually abandoning her in favor of blunter tools that would teach her to eat a wider variety of foods and let her survive in many more climes than the deep waters of the Citadel. 

With a pang that she hopes does not show on her face, E'mira lets the rubber ball in her palm bounce high and she scoops up nearly every one of the glittering stones she had cast across the garden's flagstones. 

Aewe whoops in delight. "How did you do that! How are you so fast! How come you only have three fingers left!" They're a babbling stream of questions as they slap out a hand to trap the bouncing ball against the ground and pick it up. They roll it between their palms, scrutinizing the texture while they watch E'mira without blinking, waiting for her to answer.

E'mira laughs. The small pink flowers growing up between the flagstones at her knee peal open into full blossom. "We were taught swiftness when we were small. Smaller even, we imagine, than you are now. We must be swift, in the water or on land, to snatch up food." 

Aewe set the ball bouncing and scrambled to catch as many in their non-dominant hand as they could before it struck the ground again with a quiet plunk! They snatched the ball to stop it rolling away then opened their hand to show E'mira their catch, counting off the stones aloud so that E'mira could hear.

"Good." The praise she gives is short but underlaid with genuine delight; Aewe has caught more than they did the last time. "As to your last question: they were bitten off. We have yet to regrow them." 

Aewe squinted at her face then down at her long-healed hand with its torn webbing and missing digits, then back at her face, seeking something they didn't understand. "Like a lizard regrows its tail? But I thought you were more like a fish than a lizard?"

“It would be truer to say we are both and neither.” 

“... like a frog?” 

E’mira considers the comparison, and stops herself from correcting Aewe too much-- she had marked Glorfindel’s confusion about the word  _ dragon _ , which in Arda seemed to portent something entirely wicked rather than merely powerful, and she didn’t want to mislead someone so young. Finally, she settles, “Yes, hatchling, we think that is a fair comparison. We have some things in common with creatures like that.”

“Does that mean you’re poisonous?” 

“We are.” 

It was true but Aewe hadn’t expected it to be: their warm grey eyes widen and their mouth falls open. 

E’mira thought of Saevel’s complaints that Aewe tended to bite and only just held onto her laughter and explained, “We would not be too deadly if accidentally licked but if something tried to eat us, it would probably perish if it was not very hardy, and it would not be a good death.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I see you few brave souls out there reading this. Why not drop in and let me know what line you like best so far?


	4. On Kings

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All credit for elf children being slightly terrifying cartilage creatures, and our ideas about elf designs in general, goes directly to Erran a.k.a. LesbianBoromir over on Pillowfort!! [Please go shower them with praise for their innovation and really cool artwork!](https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/1128990)

The city of Mithlond is pure Teleri architecture: flawless silver-grey stone growing from the cliffs surrounding the bay marked with delicate domes stretching still unbroken from the pillars and thick walls. As many of the domes were set with thick, sturdy glass of dwarvish make as could be had. They glittered in the sun. 

A great causeway up from the docks through the heart of the city to the gates of the palace itself, marked here and there by branching ramps leading to a dozen or more boroughs. It was a fortress in its own right, though the gates were cleverly made and were not obvious to the casual observer, and every street could be cordoned off from every other if the need arose. Everywhere within the city’s walls were growing things, tended carefully by a fleet of master gardeners whose sole purpose was to persuade the trees away from cracking up the foundations of the city with their roots. The streets were ever full, too, with trade and gossip and music. Men and Elves and Dwarves from along the coast bearing news and goods-- fewer lately, since Numenor’s great cataclysm, but no port city is ever truly bereft of activity. This time of year, the streets were covered in falling blossoms. Before long it would be time for the trees to go to fruit and then the chaos would really begin with drunken wasps bickering with tipsy finches for prime pickings and the merry bees and beetles cluttering the greening branches above with a buzzing din. All of it was-- as it ever had been and, if mercy held, would be-- underscored and magnified by the constant roar of the sea against the shore.

They were lucky, the Elves left to Middle-Earth, that this last bastion of their people’s civilization was not only safe but beautiful. It was certainly not Gondolin but Glorfindel found it fair enough.

Inside the High King’s palace was no quieter than outside it only the sound took on a more furtive shape. The doings of power always had a furtive bent to them, although Glorfindel had no idea why as he, himself, had never been so inclined. He made his way first to the libraries to seek out Erestor, an apprentice he’d taken a liking to some hundred years before. Erestor had been sent to the city guard as a recruit and promptly sought out Glorfindel to refuse such a career. 

“My time is better spent working to keep us from making the mistakes of our forebears, I think,” Erestor had told him with such pointed acidity that it’d made him laugh. The reaction had caught the budding scholar off guard, to say the least, the same as if the city bells had started ringing. But Glorfindel was the last person to have any pride caught up in the fact of being one of the Noldor; he was well aware of the crimes he had stood aside to permit. 

Glorfindel was so amused, in fact, that that same afternoon he went to the young elf’s parents to explain the situation then found him a position in the royal library instead.  _ That _ had taken the blustering wind right out of Erestor’s sails and replaced it with a deeply humble sort of gratitude. Erestor had thrown himself into his work, although Glorfindel had still insisted that they meet now and again to spar because, in this Age, it was foolish for any Elf to go without some martial education.

Over the last century-odd they'd amassed something like a friendship, or so Glorfindel thought of the cumulative years although he suspected Erestor would not admit it as freely. By nature he was a serious creature, deeply private in his affections for anything but the lore of the world, whose friendship was hard won but unerringly true. Glorfindel was quite fond of Erestor and made a point to harangue him when the mood struck.

The mood struck Glorfindel often enough that he was welcomed by the palace guards outside the hall of records with a warm smile and a nod.

“Why is it that the doings of power are always so furtive?” Glorfindel asked, striding into the librarians’ workroom without so much as a knock or a pause.

“Go away.” Erestor did not look up from the leaves he was painstakingly stitching together. Some of them were burnt at the edges and others looked to be newly copied. A restoration, clearly, some poor tome or other rescued from elsewhere in Beleriand. Morgoth’s armies didn’t see fit to spare even the most-innocent of lives, let alone silent tomes’.

“Really, I don’t understand it. We’re all working toward the same ends, since we’re all working against The Enemy, so why do we keep keeping secrets from each other?” 

“Tell me what you want to tell me or leave.” 

“What makes you think I have something to tell you?”

“I could read before I could speak,” Erestor finally glances at him, hands held still in the middle of a square stitch, thread drawn taut by the needle. His eyes are startlingly clear as he says, “and you have been an open book for as long as I’ve known you.” 

“You’ve hardly known me any time at all,” Glorfindel wanders the workroom looking over the books in various stages of undress and duress, careful not to disturb a thing. “A century isn’t anything; do you know how old I am?”

Erestor rolls his eyes and turns back to his work. But he’s clearly in a mood to be interrupted, otherwise he would be writing or in the archives several floors below or advising some counselor or other on the crafting of foreign policy. He seldom emerged into the sunny open plain of the book-surgery when he didn’t want at least a small measure of company. Life got dull fast for even the most-dedicated of scholars with only cats, scrolls, and bookworms for companions. He relents, “Power, such as us low, earthly creatures wield, is fragile above all else and so it is cautious. It doesn’t do to just go announcing one’s intentions when there is a risk of being misunderstood and therefore opposed. You know that, though.” 

“Yes, but I don’t  _ like _ it.” 

“And yet, here you are, keeping secrets of your own.” 

“E’mira is hardly a secret.”

“Oh, she has a name?” Under the thin layer of sarcasm there was genuine curiosity.

“She’s probably collected a few by now, if Aewe has had more to say.” 

“Children always have more to say. What bothers you about this  _ E’mira _ ?” 

“Nothing, Erestor, and  _ that  _ will bother… everyone else.” 

“Ah, so it’s advice you want from me.” 

“I am not subtle enough to explain her to Gil-galad.” 

Erestor carefully tied off his last stitch and set aside the densely-folded pages. He folded his hands in front of him. He looked, for just a moment, as if he truly possessed the knowledge he spent his days striving for. It was his eyes, Glorfindel decided with a feeling like revelation: they were so clear because the light of Valinor had never clouded them in the first place. He stands there for a moment, awed at the thought that has descended on him as such Knowings sometimes do, as if they'd been placed there by an outside hand and had always been true.

Erestor the Unclouded, oblivious to Glorfindel’s internal floundering, bids him, “Start from the beginning.” 

Glorfindel does.

* * *

Elf children, if Aewe is the exemplar they are implied to be, are a constantly-renewing source of enthusiasm. Indeed, they very nearly vibrate with energy the whole morning they're in E'mira's company-- she's fun! And calm! And neither her temper nor her patience seem to be exhausted by questions, even when the answers she gives bring about more questions. To make matters better still, all of her answers are stories that make the air shimmer and shake and bring forth more flowers all through Glorfindel's garden! The plants are happy to hear her make such magic as storytelling can provide and the vining moonflowers creep around her ankles. 

"I think you are Yavanna, istoneth," Aewe confides, and even though E'mira insists that isn't the case at all, they hold onto that conviction all the same.

The sound of voices beyond the courtyard steals their attention and they roll backward in a limp contortion of limbs and form that should perhaps not have been possible-- except Aewe has not yet grown their bones in and so they are as pliable as young grass. Their ears prick and they shout at E'mira, "Oh! Can I bring friends! I hear the twins!" 

They don't wait for a response (though if they cared to notice they would have seen and heard their new friend answer in the affirmative) before they clamber up over a flowering hedge then over the courtyard wall to call to their friends, "Hey! Hey! Come in! I made a new friend and she is--" 

From the kitchen Saevel almost drops the last loaf of bread he's pulling from the oven. "Aewe! Come down from there!" His tone implies, though, that he doesn't expect them to acquiesce. Elf children do what they wish when they wish it and already he's preparing the waist-lead to try to lasso his nibling again.

E'mira shakes her head at him and clears up the game of jacks-- only to produce another handful of glittering gems from somewhere on her person. "We will manage them," she says, with a smile curling at her mouth.

Saevel worries that she will regret it. Not her smile, for her smile is fair and warm despite its faintness, but being so permissive with the children.

Aewe flings themself off the top of the wall. Saevel stands back, resigned, and watches E'mira tense at the moment just before impact. But Aewe bounces with the dense sound of heavy matter striking stone, not unlike the ball they had lately been playing with. The gate clangs open from the outside and tangles in the hedges covering the wall. Through it tumble two children, much shouting, and a harried mother.

"Istoneth! This is Thala and Thiad -- they are my very closest friends! Will you teach them the ball game too? Oh, and this is their mother!" 

Aewe, clearly the ringleader of the merry trio, had captured the twins' hands and dragged them to the center of the courtyard to present them to their teacher-- until they caught sight of more shiny things on the flagstones. They squealed with delight, "Come, come! Istonesth even has a song for counting the shinies!" 

Saevel crossed to meet the children's mother, "Good morning, Thennil!"

She heaved out a breath, more tired than affronted to have found her children running off again. "Good morning! I hadn't heard your master was hosting a teacher." 

He has to laugh, "Aewe has taken to her like a duck to water," because it's as true an endorsement as he can make. 

Then E'mira begins to sing. 

It's a simple song about numbers and the cheerful bouncing of the ball being like leaping fishes, translated a little clumsily by the rhythm of it, but it holds all three children in sudden thrall. Or, more likely, the quality of E'mira's voice enraptures them. Her voice is clear and sweet but far past strange for there are layers to it, a polyphony as if multiple people sang at once, men and women, to make harmonies. Aewe sits tucked against their teacher's side with a look of appraisal and, finding their friends' reactions to their satisfaction, they beam past them at Saevel and Thennil.

"She's been doing that all morning," Saevel says, at an utter loss. "Aewe's in love, I think." 

Thennil laughs and quickly puts her hand over her mouth-- the last thing she wants to do is distract the twins. Delighted by the music and the sudden peace of the children she looks to Saevel. "I'll be back before the afternoon is out."

She backs out of the courtyard before Saevel can stop her. 

Left as the lone voice of reason in Glorfindel's house, he considers very seriously that he knows for a fact that Glorfindel has a fine selection of wine and mead in the basement. Valar preserve him, if he's going to attempt to survive three children with only the help of a single stranger, he can't see a single reason to make the attempt sober.

* * *

Glorfindel tells the tale of how he came upon E'mira the day before and does his best to retell the dense history she's imparted upon him since. His best requires, though, that he divert down side routes to explain connections and conclusions and the few wild guesses at genealogy and translation and the greater purpose of it all. As far as he can tell there is no purpose and that will comfort no one, he's sure of it, and that only furthers the problem of how best to present his guest to Gil-galad. 

He concludes, "E'mira is simply here now, sent from somewhere else. As far as I can surmise, she is not here to turn the tide or steer the course of history or do anything but live her life-- but I'm afraid we won't permit her to."

Erestor listens without interruption although the workings of questions and connections behind his watchful gaze are clear. "As you haven't been permitted to." 

"I was returned to this life by the Valar with a purpose." 

"So you were," Erestor agrees, but Glorfindel knows he sees more than he says and is absolutely certain that a future in politics will suit him well. "I think you can avoid presenting her at court--" 

"--That's a start--" 

"--but the King must meet her. It would be... unwise to rely on the strength of your own reputation, it would look like arrogance. Even if she is as you say she is, he will better believe the proof of his own judgement." 

"And if the King disagrees with me?" 

Erestor shrugs. "She might be sent away in which case she'll simply live her life without the interference of the Eldar... and, to be frank, I can't think of a better fate for her than that." 

"Must you always be so dour?" 

"Given how much of our history you've witnessed firsthand, Glorfindel, it's a wonder that you aren't." 

* * *

By the time Glorfindel arrives with a royal retinue in tow-- no less than Gil-galad himself with the kingsguard and, inexplicably but necessarily in Glorfindel’s opinion, Erestor the librarian-- the number of children occupying his courtyard has doubled again. They can be heard singing from far up the street. It is a simple counting song full of animal mimicry and the chorus of a half-dozen voices is making a fair job of polyphony, although every verse or so someone will stop to correct E’mira’s pronunciation. She bears being taught with delighted grace and teaches the children in return, building new harmonies to stack around the simplistic melody and assigning each one to a different child.

In the back of the courtyard, perched in a hammock Glorfindel didn’t know he owned, is Saevel. There is a bottle of wine in the crook of his elbow that looks to be mostly empty. 

The children all turn in unison toward the oncoming excitement. It’s Aewe who leads the charge to meet Glorfindel, though, with a piercing battlecry of, “ _ Glórinmellon _ !” That’s all the warning he gets before he’s beset by the children, climbing and wriggling as children are wont to do. 

“Elf children should be called caterpillars,” he complains, lifting a pair he recognizes as a shipwright’s twins onto his shoulder. 

One twin takes the other by the ankles and together they help haul a tow-headed child he doesn’t recognize at all onto his opposite side. Then, one twin uses his shoulder to climb up onto the garden wall. Glorfindel grunts but bears his new role as a scaffold with little complaint. “Ai, E’mira! Did they ambush you or have you been trying to teach all of them at once?” 

“They were teaching her,” Saevel calls from his hammock; his tone is all laughter, “She didn’t know the counting song.” 

“The one about the turtles?” 

“The same!” 

Glorfindel smiles, “Then it’s long past time that she learned.” 

“Lord Glorfindel,” the tow-headed child begins in a stage whisper from their perch on his shoulder, “is it true you slew a balrog?” 

Glorfindel stills, startled by the mere thought of the memory, but Erestor comes to his rescue. He lifts the child from Glorfindel’s shoulder by their ear. Almost immediately and with all the tenacity of a cat, the elfling twists in Erestor’s grasp, trying to work their feet up onto his arm to leverage their ear from his grasp. 

“He slew  _ two _ ,” Erestor corrects with all the frosty impatience of a longsuffering tutor, not pausing to acknowledge their writhing, “with Ecthelion of the Fountain, also called Gothmog’s Bane. A fact which you would know if you had paid any attention to your history lessons, Nimras. You’ve embarrassed me.” 

Embarrassment only serves to give the child a moment pause, wherein they look from Erestor to E’mira. Another child, far quieter than the twins or Nimras or Aewe, vaults from Glorfindel’s back and straight into one of the kingsguard’s breastplates. Glorfindel winces in sympathy-- although who deserves the sympathy more is up for debate.

With the children running amok and the garden twice as full as it was when he left that morning, his house is on the brink of the most cheerful cacophony he's ever witnessed, and he finds himself overjoyed with it. He turns to grin first at Erestor (who meets him with a reluctant smile of his own because there are few Elves who can remain stony in the face of childrens' happiness, no matter how rowdy or disruptive) and then at Gil-galad.

E'mira sits blinking at the loss of her audience of pupils. It's surprised her how quickly these children shift, how fast they fell upon the new arrivals with their overwhelming desire for attention and enrichment. She is utterly unfamiliar with them. She wants to learn all about them.

"Saevel is correct," she says, addressing the company who stand just inside the yard. They have the same air of importance that outlanders she met often did, dressed in warm, rich colors and too much soft metal. "We were teaching Aewe and then Thala and Thiad happened upon us-- and from there they have multiplied. We have not seen so many children... nay, we have not seen any child in our lifetime that was not our own daughter. They are a treasure to teach and masterful teachers in their own right." 

The earnest awe in her voice would imply oncoming tears if she were a creature capable of producing them. But then she resolves herself like a dissonant chord and calls out a word that is entirely unfamiliar to the gathered Elves. All at once, the children stop their clambering, going limp in the way of children eager to escape the grasping hands of parents the world over. But being elf children, they all but drip back to the ground and roll back to their semicircle around E'mira. Erestor set Nimras down more gently than he had picked them up and they darted off, too, in a liquid canter to sit beside their teacher. 

Nimras starts to whine a complaint, "Istoneth, we were just--" 

E'mira ruffles their hair with a gentle hand. "Hush. It is improper to climb upon others without first requesting-- and receiving-- permission to touch them." 

Aewe, who had wriggled to sit in E'mira's lap, goes still and E'mira, without thinking, ducks her head to press a kiss to the child's crown.

"Now," she starts, "we were learning the counting song of the turtles and it must be finished. No Song should ever be left adrift." 

Saevel, who had slipped from the hammock to join the rest of the adults standing in awe at the gate, gestures with the dregs of his bottle of wine. "She's a child-whisperer. Eru only knows what sort of gift it is that she has, but I don't think anyone in their right mind would complain of it."

Glorfindel turns to gesture at Gil-galad as if to say,  _ Do you see? It is as Saevel says, she is a child-whisperer _ . “I’m sure she’ll be amenable to anything you want to ask after what I’ve already told you, but you should at least let them finish teaching her the turtle-song first. She’s far too old not to know it.” 

The king’s usually-kind mien is unreadable. 

The gaggle of children make E’mira start from the beginning once more. Her voice is as sweet as Glorfindel had suspected it might be and the nonsensical story that taught elf-children 

numbers came alive as she sang: small lizards crept down the vines of flowers-- which hadn’t been due to bloom for weeks yet -- to alight in E’mira’s hair like little living dwarven beads. A collective of turtles has appeared in the lily-crowded pool along the Western wall. A nightingale sits in the lowest-hanging branch that is nearest to the teacher and does not sing at all but looks, for all the world, to be listening to her with something like envy. 

“Well-sung, Istoneth,” Gil-galad permits when the courtyard falls quiet and Glorfindel’s heart soars. “Do you have plans for lunch? I think we have much to discuss, if your pupils can stand to be parted from you.” 

The prospect of leaving breaks the spell and sends the children whining again as if the very suggestion of it is a cruel and unjust punishment.

E'mira raises a brow. (She has no hair above her eyes, and no eyelashes besides, but the fine bones and skin there are lined with delicate scales in pale gold that edge up her temples and into her hairline and serve to highlight her eye orbits in the same manner.) She advises the children in a clear voice that carries over their complaints, "If you go home now then we may meet sooner tomorrow." 

"With their parents' permission," Erestor interjects but despite him this still puts the children into a better humor. They scramble up, all of them chittering and happy to debate what will be the order of business tomorrow. They all agree that they must meet at Glorfindel's gate as soon as breakfast is done. In a great stumbling of limbs, the children filter out of the garden debating the new games and songs that Istoneth must be taught because it isn't right or proper for a teacher to be so uneducated; someone must teach her and clearly none of the grown ups are capable or qualified. 

There is a brief moment of anticipatory near-silence once most of the gaggle have departed but Aewe stays firmly planted in E'mira's lap. "Tomorrow will be even better," they promise, "You have a lot to learn but you learn fast. It'll be fun!" 

E'mira doesn't doubt for a moment that they are right. 

The nightingale gives a querying warble and a few frogs, who have joined the turtles on the edge of the pond sitting near to E'mira, burble in answer. A bearded dragon slinks from beneath a bush and begins, slowly, to climb up E'mira's shoulder. She stays still, letting it climb up toward her hair at its own pace.

"You did not say that your people have such wonderful hatchlings, fir'ha," she tells Glorfindel almost with an air of sisterly admonishment. "Prithee, allow them to visit with more frequency. The mirrored children stated that they find themselves frequently with naught to occupy their time." 

"It's more likely that they run through what they deem to be "fun" more quickly than their parents and teachers can come up with more ways to make chores and study fun," Erestor suggests with the weight of fact behind his words. He has never striven to be his own students' favorite teacher but he has also never faulted them for their high energy and boundless curiosity. 

"We don't have fare for a proper lunch," Saevel says, apropos of little but his own sudden and anxious sobriety at the prospect of having to make Glorfindel's sparse house fit for kingly company, "but what we have is fresh enough and wholesome?" 

Glorfindel steps forward to offer his hands to Aewe and E'mira, ostensibly to help them both up. "Come, let me introduce you to the king, E'mira, for he is very curious about you and I would have the two of you be friends." 

The bearded dragon has made itself comfortable in a drooping loop of a braid, it's eyes drifting closed and at peace. E'mira for her part seems unbothered by its presence, but then there had also been a number of snakes she had ushered off before the many children could become too curious. Those of her cold-blooded brethren often sought her out for though physically she was often too cold, she knew from the telling of others that the magic which comprised all of her people could be quite warm.

It was an alchemy which she had never yet been privy to learning and she thought, without Huragan or even any of her own blood kin, she was neither likely too. It was enough to see familiar species of creature.

She inclined her head and allowed Glorfindel to help her to her feet, though she kept Aewe tucked to her hip. It was no hardship, the child was far lighter than Mia had been at that size and it soothed something heartsick in her chest to have a child so near. 

"Then it is fortuitous that we have much experience in the busying of learning minds and bodies. In our own time we were often tasked with the training of the am'pa who sought y’yrnuvia and sao'ni'fa of Huragan who was our Mentor." Those long-past days in the acid lowlands raising up soldiers who would reach glory or death or both long before she did made her hold Aewe a little closer. She had done what was required of her, everything the Mother asked and more.

* * *

It's a blessing that Glorfindel started more bread than he could finish for Saevel had finished it well in the course of the morning and now there were soft, sweet loaves enough for everyone. With them yet more produce from Glorfindel's overstocked pantry, though meat of any kind was conspicuously absent. From the scattered rooms Glorfindel produces mismatched chairs and without any fanfare at all they all crowd around the kitchen table. It didn't quite groan but that was only down to the solid craftsmanship of its maker. 

"E'mira," Glorfindel began, ripping contentedly into a loaf of bread with a star cut into its top, "This is Gil-galad; he has many titles, as you can surmise from my people's fondness for names, but chief among them is High King of the Noldor. He is fair-minded and a friend of mine." In as much as he could consider anyone a friend now that he was, without entirely meaning to be, a prophet of the Valar. 

"Your Majesty, may I present E'mira of Ichlowand." He was taking things entirely out of order. "She is newly come to Lindon and, I think, to Arda entirely. She has a knack for teaching." He's said little of the strange armor he found her in and less about the war that heralded her death before Mandos found her. Erestor had advised caution and Glorfindel could manage at least a modicum of it.

Gil-galad is unbothered by the lack of decorum, seemingly content to observe this newcomer in Glorfindel's house. He doesn't touch the food laid before him. "I imagine that is quite the tale; it isn't often the Eldar are re-embodied; it is rarer, still, for other races to be given such an opportunity. Were you sent here on some errand of the Valar?"

Seated once more in the warmth of the kitchen, E'mira pauses to wonder at the loaves of soft, sweet smelling bread presented them. She takes only a few small bites, allowing Aewe to nibble at the rest of the crusty loaf once she has finished her own. Her longing stare pierces E'mira beneath her sternum. Often had Mia stared so at any food available to them.

Finally she turns that piercing green stare on Gil Galad and inclines her head, "A'na'ara Ashta en'ene'ya Gil galad, we are called E'mira in the tongue of our people." The crystal in the kitchen hummed at the strange words slipping from her mouth and she paid them no mind. "We do not know of your Valar. We are Ichlowandian, of the world Illyria. Upon our thrice-death, our Mother sought to untether us from the souls of our kin. It was in the Halls of your Mandos we found ourselves, though the reason was beyond our ken. Still... yours is a world peaceful where ours was not."

It is telling that E'mira's principal impression of Arda is one of peace-- if it is really to be believed that she is of another world which, while outrageous, is seeming more likely the longer Gil-galad looks upon her. 

She has the look of a fable. 

Maiar are seldom so conspicuous in their bearings but the fae spirits that first animated the world at the beckoning of the Valar, Iarwain Ben-adar springs to his mind first, seem the most likely sorts of companions for a creature such as this. So perhaps she is a being wholly unlike an elf, without malevolence and without allegiance to the concerns of flesh-bound creatures. More telling still is the way she eats. Or rather, the way she doesn't eat, feeding the remaining child at the table first with the same anxious reflex he'd seen in his own father. Fingon had been no stranger to hunger, to want and to cold, and had always seen to it that those with the greatest need ate first, even in times of plenty.

Weighing all of this, he asks, "Were you a teacher to your people long?" 

She meets and keeps his gaze and considers his question long. His hair is near to the same shade as Ostry's had been. Like loamy dirt, and his eyes are of equal color. Like the amber found in the en'tira during especially hot years.

"We were...our title was Fah'ti. Which would be equal we think, to your own “High King”. Though mine own people did not bear males to rule, nor to warmake. Ours... were ill suited to those duties. Fah'ti were of Idryalla that Was, the First of our Kin to make landfall and walk with legs and breathe with lungs. It is she who sheltered our people, and shepherded them when than'li'ar, the creatures from the Breach crawled their way free from the Nothing between All. It is she who was First of the line of Fah'ti and Ruler of Ichlowand and the Seas."

She swallows, "We were no teacher. We were made in and born to War. For the Mother Goddess does not walk amongst the First Children, but even she might bestow kindness and blessings upon those who seek to make right the wrongs of their forebears."

Aewe squirmed, not at all interested in any of the proceedings. Glorfindel reached across the table to hand them more fruit to snack on-- pale, seeded river-melon was among their favorites-- and that satisfied them for a moment.

“Have you righted those wrongs, E’mira, or did Mandos serve another purpose for you?” 

His meaning is plain to the amassed elves. On E’mira’s left, Erestor inhaled a bit of bread and did his best to choke delicately.

“I hardly think she was a prisoner of--” Glorfindel began but stopped when Gil-galad held up a hand to silence him.

The king gestured again, bidding E’mira to make her answer.

E’mira frowned. Just the smallest sort thing, it hardly moved her mouth at all. “We are unsure of your meaning. Speak plainly.”

“Did the Valar hold you as a prisoner for any of the wrongs you alluded to? Yours, or your forebears’?” 

E’mira blinked and then realization dawned across her face and she shook her head. Pearls and bells clattering together from the force of it. “No, we were not held prisoner in the halls of your Mandos.”

There is no lie in her eyes-- although eyes like that would cast doubt onto any heart that beheld them, slitted and passing strange and catching every stray light with a green glow.

"Then you should stay in Mithlond for the time being," he decides, "as a welcome guest." It has all the weight of a law behind it. To Glorfindel, he adds, "I assume you will have no issue continuing to host E'mira; a decade should have more than prepared Cabdir to take your place as Captain of the Guard, even if only on a temporary basis." 

"Oh, certainly," Glorfindel can do little but scramble to agree; if E'mira is to be kept, if she is to be watched for some kind of danger or spycraft, then he would prefer to serve as her warden. 

Inwardly, E'mira wonders if it would help her position at all to assure this Elven King that Ichlowandians were not capable of making untruths. She had, in the past and at great need, learned to talk around the truth or to bend it like a willow, but lying? It had never served a purpose for her when her people all knew the truth of her thoughts at a glance-- and she, theirs.

She remembers suddenly the great vacancy in the back of her mind where once the whole of her species' memory lived and breathed. She swallowed. "There should be no reason to remove Glorfindel from his duties. We would not see one so kind and duty-bound punished for welcoming a stranger... even one such as ourself, who passes strangeness for you and yours." She pauses and calculates for a moment. "We do not know what use we may be but we may offer our skills in exchange for your permitting our continued presence in your citadel."

The king's eyebrows raise and he remembers: this woman was a queen in her own right, in her own fashion, albeit like no queen he's met yet in Middle Earth. "According to what I've seen so far you have quite the aptitude with children; I'm sure our own Erestor could put you to great use as a teacher." 

Glorfindel exchanged a glance with Erestor, who sat at the king's elbow looking altogether uncomfortable. It was clever enough, if obvious. E'mira would never be far from the palace and its well-armed guards -- or else from Glorfindel himself who was no stranger to the unknowable or to danger-- and Erestor could be trusted implicitly to account for her doings. Among children, too, there would be no secrets. It would be shocking if Aewe  _ didn’t  _ spread the current conversation to their parents and the whole city beyond before dawn.

"E'mira would have to be a student herself, first," Glorfindel interjected, casually gesturing with a slice of pear, "but I think the children of the city wouldn't object to having a new classmate."

That caught Aewe's attention away from putting braids into the ends of E'mira's hair; they broke into a toothy grin. "You'll like school, istoneth! It'll be more fun with you there." 

Gil-galad had the air of a man who was incredibly pleased with himself. 

Erestor continued to look somewhat pained. 

Saevel chose that moment to step away from the table and fetch more wine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you'd like us to translate the Ichlowandian for you, let us know. Otherwise, know that most of E'mira's dialogue is translated to English where it's most-relevant and won't cost you too much comprehension.

**Author's Note:**

> You know the drill, comrades: your commentary is more precious than gold.


End file.
